Hoping to add a site search to my TAXA website

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Right now, the only way readers can search for anything in the wood
botanical tree I have built is by botanical (scientific) names:
www.prowebcanada.com/taxa
Most people would wish to find woods and information about them by
their common names
or perhaps other search terms such as by country they grow in and
other search choices.
I hope to be able soon, therefore, to install a general site search
engine that can search
through all the MySQL files being used to store all the data ---
hopefully one that is free code,
using PHP and downloadable from the Net.

Do any of you have favorite site search software you would recommend?
Other desired criteria include:

- All pages are dynamically driven. The search application
does not have to search
pages much because all data that shows is stored my MySQL
tables in a database
simply called 'taxa'. It needs to do its searching from
within those tables.

- Question: At some stage (setup?) would I have to specify
every table it should look
into? Could I also use different searches for each area
(eg. for species, for genera,
for families, etc.)

- PHP source code should be readily available in case I need
to modify something.

- I work on windows at home but the website is on a Linux
account at GoDaddy.
The software must therefore be independent of working only
on Windows.

- I have 6,500 records for the species table but that will
expand well past 12,000
eventually. The site search has to be able to handle that
and more. Many of the
programs on the Web talk in terms of how many pages but
that does not make
as much sense here as searching through thousands of records.

- Preferred: For setup, the simpler the better.

I took a quick initial look but am willing to bet that someone in our
group has one or more
favorite, proven solutions.

I look forward to your suggestions :-) .

Bill Mudry
Mississauga, ON
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Re: Hoping to add a site search to my TAXA website

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hi.

how many different tables are we talking about?
could you show us the structure of the tables?
if you are using myisam for the tables, you can use the built in full text
search feature (match ... against), or if you are not afraid of programming,
I would recommend solr or sphinx, but it can be an overkill.
if you want an easy way to allow your users to search your site, you could
build a sitemap, upload it to google (if you haven't did it yet) and use
google to search your site's content:
http://www.google.com/cse/
or
http://www.google.com/sitesearch/

Tyrael

On Thu, Apr 29, 2010 at 7:08 PM, Bill Mudry wrote:

> Right now, the only way readers can search for anything in the wood
> botanical tree I have built is by botanical (scientific) names:
> www.prowebcanada.com/taxa
> Most people would wish to find woods and information about them by their
> common names
> or perhaps other search terms such as by country they grow in and other
> search choices.
> I hope to be able soon, therefore, to install a general site search engine
> that can search
> through all the MySQL files being used to store all the data --- hopefully
> one that is free code,
> using PHP and downloadable from the Net.
>
> Do any of you have favorite site search software you would recommend? Other
> desired criteria include:
>
> - All pages are dynamically driven. The search application does not
> have to search
> pages much because all data that shows is stored my MySQL tables
> in a database
> simply called 'taxa'. It needs to do its searching from within
> those tables.
>
> - Question: At some stage (setup?) would I have to specify every
> table it should look
> into? Could I also use different searches for each area (eg. for
> species, for genera,
> for families, etc.)
>
> - PHP source code should be readily available in case I need to
> modify something.
>
> - I work on windows at home but the website is on a Linux account at
> GoDaddy.
> The software must therefore be independent of working only on
> Windows.
>
> - I have 6,500 records for the species table but that will expand
> well past 12,000
> eventually. The site search has to be able to handle that and
> more. Many of the
> programs on the Web talk in terms of how many pages but that does
> not make
> as much sense here as searching through thousands of records.
>
> - Preferred: For setup, the simpler the better.
>
> I took a quick initial look but am willing to bet that someone in our group
> has one or more
> favorite, proven solutions.
>
> I look forward to your suggestions :-) .
>
> Bill Mudry
> Mississauga, ON

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